


we know by the moon (we are not too soon)

by illumynare



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Christmas Caroling, F/M, Gen, The Dawning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 14:57:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17024787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare
Summary: On the first night of the first Dawning after they survived the Mare Imbrium, Eris and her fireteam go wassailing in the City.





	we know by the moon (we are not too soon)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nemonus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/gifts).



> [Wassailing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassailing) is an actual English tradition dating back to the Middle Ages; it was practiced more or less as depicted here, though carrying a piece of toast is my own invention, inspired by the related practice of [Apple Wassailing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Wassail), where offerings of toast and wassail were given to the trees in the local orchard. 
> 
> The lyrics that Eris & co. sing are adapted from the famous [Gloucester Wassail](https://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/wassail_wassail_all_over_1.htm); while writing this story, I listened a lot to [this instrumental version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt90Cwt3Zng). Title and epigraph are from Steeleye Span's rendition of the [Gower Wassail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vwwEmQmSWs).

_It's we poor wassail boys so weary and cold_  
_Please drop some small silver into our bowl._  
_And if we survive for another new year_  
_Perhaps we may call and see who does live here_

_We know by the moon that we are not too soon,_  
_And we know by the sky that we are not too high,_  
_And we know by the star that we are not too far,_  
_And we know by the ground that we are within sound._

_—The Gower Wassail  
_

 

"It's called Wassailing," says Omar, his eyes glinting with an enthusiasm only a little like the madness of those entranced by the Hive. "You'll _love_ it."

Eris shakes her head to clear away the thought. Omar is the least Hive-addled Guardian that ever was, and they are none of them in danger now. It is the first night of the Dawning, and they are in Eriana's rooms, waiting for Wei Ning to finish baking Gjallardoodles.

Existence is a game that everything plays, but right now, none of them are keeping score. If the universe does, it is also keeping silence. And in that silence—

"You've never celebrated the Dawning in the Last City, have you?" Omar goes on. "Only the Tower or the Wild."

Lights flicker in Eriana's cheeks and her circuits hum and click. "Is that a relevant distinction?" she asks.

"Of course it is," Wei Ning calls out as she lifts from the oven her last sheet of Gjallardoodles. She lays the cookie-sheet on the countertop and smiles at them all, only a little crooked.

There's a smudge of flour on her cheek—the damaged one, where her brown skin is marbled with pale, ridged scars left by Crota's green flames. No matter how long she dwells beneath the Traveler's light, no matter how many times she dies and rises again, her Ghost will never be able to take away those scars.

Eriana's throat-lights flicker with an echo of old terror as she looks at those scars, and Eris feels an answering flutter in her heart. Neither of them will ever forget the sight of Wei spitted on Crota's blade, feet dangling in the empty air, green flames dancing around her writhing body in a mockery of the Traveler's Light.

They had so nearly lost her then. Eriana, late-come to the battlefield, had been too far away to do anything. Eris had stuck close to Wei for the whole day, and yet she had barely been fast enough. If she had lacked the strength for one final, desperate Bladedance—if she had dropped to her knees by Wei's broken body a minute later—if she had hesitated one instant to pour her own flickering Light into Wei's Ghost—

Then Wei's Ghost would have fallen dead into the Lunar dust, and Wei Ning of the Fire Victorious would be one more pile of ash and bones among a thousand others. Eriana would have been destroyed by her grief, and Eris—

It's best not to think of that, really.

None of them have been the same since the Mare Imbrium. But they are all alive. Eris always reminds herself of this when she wakes screaming from nightmares of what once happened, and what might have been.

Right now, in the stuffy but fragrant warmth of the kitchen, with a little prickle of sweat starting on her neck, she can truly feel the joy of it.

She's lost the thread of the conversation, absorbed in her own thoughts, but it doesn't matter because the door bangs open as Vell and Sai arrive together, him carrying a strange silver jug and her with a small cask of wine.

"Turns out my grandam had one," says Vell, meaning the current matriarch of his adopted family, descendants of a band of pilgrims that he once guided to the City. "Like it?" he asks, holding the jug out to Omar for inspection.

Omar takes the jug and turns it over, fingering the strange little holes and spouts that honeycomb its neck. "Well enough," he says, grinning as if no Thrall ever sank its teeth into his arm and ripped out tendons while Crota approached with steps that shook the ground.

Sai, who once carried him on her back out of the Mare Imbrium, rolls her eyes and says, "Can we drink now?"

"Right away," says Omar. "The question is, can you drink without spilling?"

"Geometrically impossible," says Eriana, studying the jug as Omar fills it with wine.

"I thought Warlocks redefined possible," says Wei Ning, smiling crookedly as she rests an elbow on Eriana's shoulder. "Give it to me, Omar, I'm not afraid."

Omar ignores Eriana's staticky indignation and hands the jug to Wei. She smacks her mouth to the neck of the jar and tilts her head back, cheerfully gulping wine as it pours over her face and neck. When she lowers the jug, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "Who's next?"

"That was disgusting," says Eriana, though she does not pull away.

"I'll do it," says Eris, and takes the damp jar from Wei's hands. She examines it. Listens to the wine slosh against it walls, like the echo of Wizard-voices down the Hive tunnels beneath the surface of the moon.

Now as then, she moves without sight, lifting the jug and pressing its neck to her mouth. Her tongue skims the holes and spouts, tasting the air inside them. She finds the right spout; her fingers find and stop up the right holes.

She tilts her head back, and drinks without spilling.

When she lowers the jug, there's a moment of silence as they all stare at her, and she's at once proud of their scrutiny and a little frightened. She has always been the quietest of their fireteam, for all that she speaks more words than Sai, but now her victory with the jug echoes through the room. Perhaps they will wonder how she knew—

Wei laughs again, and lays her hand on Eris's forehead, smearing her with wine. "Nobody goes out dry tonight," she announces. "Don't tell them how it's done, Eris. Who's next?"

#

So together, damp with wine and carrying an empty jug that only Eris knows how to drink from, they go down into the City. They walk door to door, Eriana in the lead as she carries a piece of toast on a pointed stick carved from an apple tree. (Omar assures them that to be "toastmaster" of a wassailing-party is a great and ancient honor.) Whenever a door opens for them, they sing:

_Wassail! wassail! all over the town,_  
_Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;_  
_Our bowl it is made of spinmetal fine,_  
_And if thou but fill it, we'll toast thee and thine._

Eris had been skeptical, before they started. She had thought that Omar was overconfident. Surely there were not so many houses in the c\City that would pour out drinks to begging Guardians. Surely they would see the survivors of the Mare Imbrium and know what ill fate clung to them.

But the people of the City, kind fools that they are, do not. Instead they open their doors, and listen to them sing, and then fill their jar with the hot spiced wassail-wine. They laugh as Omar and Sai, Vell and Wei Ning take turns dousing themselves as they try to drink from the jar.

Perhaps that is why the people are so welcoming, Eris thinks. No matter how well Guardians defend the City, no matter how often they go to its bars and ramen shops, they are strange and terrible still. Perhaps it is a comfort for these people to see Guardians spilling wine on themselves as they sing ridiculous verses about the Vanguard.

_Here's to Zavala, and to his right ear,_  
_The Traveler send him a happy new year:_  
_A happy new year as e'er he did see,  
_ _With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee._

_So here is to Andal and to his right cheek,_  
_The Traveler grant him what e'er drink he seek:_  
_To make him as drunk as a Hunter should be,  
_ _With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee._

_Here's to Ikora, and to her right eye,_  
_The Traveler send her a good Dawning pie:_  
_A good Dawning pie as e'er we did see,  
_ _With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee._

As the night winds on they grow merrier, and so do the people welcoming them. Sometimes they are invited inside a house to eat Vanilla Blades and Traveler Donut Holes. Omar and Sai both flirt with drunken abandon (Sai wins more kisses than Omar does). Vell and Wei start challenging people to arm-wrestling matches, which invariably end with them wrestling each other, one of them standing as proxy for the poor civilian. Eriana laughs more lightly than she has since the Mare Imbrium.

Eris watches.

It's what she's best at. What she delights in most, these days. To rest her eyes on the people who have become so dear to her, who live against such odds.

She drinks, too. Not as much as the rest of them, but enough that when they arrive at the main house of Vell's adopted family, her body feels a quicksilver lightness almost like she's in a Bladedance.

Vell's family's house is loud and bright and crowded, and within five minutes it has given Eris a headache. She mutters an excuse and slips out into the dark alleyway behind. Here, with the roar of celebration muted, she leans against the cool strength of the wall and tilts her head up to look at the stars.

_Look up at the sky,_ a subaudible voice whispers in her ear.

Eris is. She has. She did, and chose because of it.

This is the game of existence that she has played: to win this timeline where all her friends are alive, even at ferocious cost.

Most of those who [bargain] do not win.

So far, Eris thinks she is staying ahead.

#

Long ago [in a time yet to come] Eris had thought resentfully that she would like to see how well Cayde endured being stripped of friends and Light and laughter.

But when he returned from the Prison of Elders, his Ghost dead by a sniper's bullet, his "favorite Guardian" (Eris's _friend)_ dead saving him from Uldren—

The sight was not so delicious as she had hoped.

It was pure chance that she learned the bitter taste of it at all. When Eris left the Tower, she had meant to devote herself entirely to fighting the Dark alongside Mara Sov. But in a moment of weakness, she returned to see Ikora and ask for news of Asher.

She found Ikora grieving a protégé, the Tower grieving a hero, and Cayde grieving the loss of his heroism.

No: not just that. It galled Eris to admit it, but Cayde did care about a few things besides his jokes and his roguish reputation. Else he would not have come to her and said, "Hey, weren't you part of the Great Ahamkara Hunt?"

"What of it?" asked Eris, her hand still resting on the spines of Ikora's books that she had been browsing.

"Well," said Cayde, and his swagger was now a hollow, ragged thing, "I got a crazy idea. Ahamkara grant wishes, right? And didn't they mess with the timelines on Venus?"

Truly, his idea was madness. A year ago, Eris would have called it impossible too. But since then, she had learned more of the Ahamkara: what they were, what they could do, and how they might be bent to a clever enough will.

And perhaps Eris was not so cured of her youthful foolishness as she had thought. For she could not disdain Cayde's mad plan to set right the Guardian's death; and one she had begun to think of changing history, she could not help but wonder—how many more might be saved?

If Wei Ning never died, and Eriana-3 had no reason for vengeance, how much could be set right?

Nine nights Eris stayed up talking with Cayde, plotting their path to change the things that had most wounded them. On the tenth night, she summoned Toland, and together the three of them walked through the Void to the Dreaming City.

And then they began to pay their prices.

#

Cayde's price was most simple: he died killing Dûl Incaru. His last words were as brash and brave as he could have wished: "Hey, I got this. You go ahead. Keep our Guardian safe."

Eris had not explained to him how his death would open a throne world on the edge of the Distributary, how Dûl Incaru's passing would give them the power to lure and trap Riven. In their last moments together, she realized she did not need to. He had gone with her believing he would be fodder for whatever sorcery she worked.

Her own price was twofold: the subjectively eternal agony when Riven's searing tentacles of wish and will and causality wrapped around her limbs and tried to tear her apart, a torment that ended only when the last causal filaments binding her to that time frayed apart . . . and the doubt that has followed her ever since. From the moment Eris woke up in her body-that-was nine weeks before the Mare Imbrium, she has wondered if she really did survive Riven, or if her torment really ended. If it was her _self_ that traveled back in time, or only her memories.

But if the Eris Morn that will be died in Riven's embrace, or if she suffers still in a dimension sundered from the flow of time—it is worth it. Because the Eris Morn that _is_ , still exists, and knows what she must do in order to protect.

Her fireteam lives, because of it.

(Her Ghost believes that she is truly the Eris of the future. She swears to Eris that her Light has changed—not dimmed, but shifted in tonality—and says, "There are more knives in your Bladedance now." Eris cannot always believe her Ghost's reassurances, her Ghost who was always too trusting and too gentle, but it is comfort enough to hear that long-silent voice speaking to her, believing in her.)

Toland's price was not simple, but perhaps most easy. Dragged along with her into the past, his exalted self was too shattered and too transformed to synchronize with his past body; instead he overwrote himself, and became a wandering spirit who endlessly haunted her, complaining all the while about the current emptiness of the Sea of Screams. Eris rolled her eyes at him, but never bid him be gone.

(And there were nights where he summoned the strength for a semi-corporeal body, and he rested against her with nearly human weight, and he kissed every one of her fingers and ran his own, too-long and too-jointed pale fingers through her dark auburn hair as he whispered, _My dear squanderer.)_

So they have all made their [bargains], paid their prices. Eris knows there is more yet to be paid of hers. For when the Guardian rises again, she must take up the mantle of Crota's Bane. She will share what she knows, and keep her promise of vengeance even when the deaths she avenges are null and void. And then perhaps she will tell Ikora the truth—all of it—about Oryx and Gaul and Mara Sov, and what Eris herself has been and has become.

She will keep her promise to Cayde as well. When (if) Uldren starts down his path of ruin, she will do whatever it takes, go to the Prison of Elders with Cayde himself, to keep their Guardian safe.

And then—

One day, if she has the luck to survive that long, she will be free from her burden of knowledge. She will face the future as blindly as any other Guardian—and she will _be_ a Guardian, will have all the lore she learned in the Dark yet still possess the Light as well.

The thought of that far-off day feels . . . almost like hope.

A strange, but welcome feeling.

#

" _Wæs_ _þu_ _hæl_ ," says a quiet, female voice.

Startled from her reverie, Eris turns. Beside her stands an Exo wearing a Hunter-like hood and cape, a pulse-rifle strapped at her back. Yet she's not a Guardian: no Ghost floats at her side, and Eris can sense no hum of Light from her presence, only—

A soft, sibilant whisper that is almost Darkness, but not quite.

Old Tower rumors and the Guardian's stories crash together in her head. Eris straightens.

"You're the Exo Stranger," she breathes.

"Yes," says the Exo, and then continues, half-turning as she speaks over comms to someone not present, "Yes, I _just_ found them. Can't it wait?"

_Insufferable rudeness,_ Toland mutters at Eris's shoulder. _What conceit._

The Exo Stranger turns back to them, eyes picking out the spot where Toland hovers. "Unlike you, Shattered One?"

"You know what we are?" asks Eris, warily starting to reach for the Light. Her Ghost appears silently at her side. They both know she is not like those the Exo Stranger is said to help.

"What you did was abominable," says the Exo Stranger. "There are reasons the Ahamkara were hunted to extinction."

Eris meets her gaze steadily. "There are reasons for what we did."

Toland winks into sight, a little white ball of glowing light that floats imperiously toward the Exo Stranger. "Do not preach to us, causality-bound simpleton. Have you parsed the ascendant geometries? Have you watched the laws of reality rewrite themselves upon the Sea of Screams?"

"Yes," the Exo Stranger says bluntly.

Eris can't help feeling a flicker of amusement at the way Toland bobs back, surprised into silence.

"I'm not going to redact you," the Exo Stranger goes on. "This timeline is surprisingly stable. Some factors have even . . . improved. But if you're to interfere at this level, I need to know if you've chosen a side. And which one."

"A simple-minded question," Toland hisses, "fit for those bound by liminality, who do not understand the possibility of—"

"He stands with me," Eris interrupts.

A soft noise almost like a chuckle escapes the Exo Stranger's visor. "And you?"

"I choose the Light," say Eris, steadfast-sure. "I protect the Guardians and the Last City."

The Exo Stranger cocks her head. "Even at the cost of your own Light again?"

Eris hisses, Hive-sibilant, Darkness-soft, remembering the weight of three eyes and the agony of slow, poisonous tears.

"Yes," she says. "I have. I will. I do."

In every world, in every timeline, she will be a claw in the throat of the Dark. She will make any unholy bargain that she must, to accomplish it.

The Exo Stranger nods, strange and solemn. "Yes. You do. —What's that?" She turns away suddenly, speaking again to her distant companions. "Well, start charging the canons, then. Prepare to fire on my mark."

She looks back over her shoulder. "There's so much more out there in the Dark than even you know. But you're beginning to learn. We'll meet again, Erisia Pyatova-Hsien."

And she vanishes in a shimmering web of light.

Eris stares after her, ignoring Toland's muttered discontent. The name _Erisia Pyatova-Hsien_ echoes strangely in her head, knocking at still-forgotten memories. A vertiginous thought strikes her: she knows her own origin as little as she does the Exo Stranger's.

More mysteries are in motion around her than she had guessed at.

That, too, feels like hope.

And Eris, who was once Crota's Bane and will be again, who has walked in and out of timelines and bent an Ahamkara to her will, who has been a creature both Light and Dark, and who once (perhaps) was Erisia Pyatova-Hsien—

Eris sets the mysteries of herself and the universe aside for the rest of the night, and goes back inside to drink with her fireteam.


End file.
